UNIX SIG May 2009 May 20, 2009

This is just a quick post today, I was going to continue on my theme of select count(*) but it’s been a long, tiring day. I’ll do it tomorrow.

I was off over to Wolverhampton to present at the oracle user group UNIX SIG (special interest group) today. I felt there was a need for more introductory presentations as they tend to be expert ones these days, people talking about the latest, coolest things they had found out. Great though such talks are, for many users, these can be a little beyond where they are and discussions I have had suggest that a lack of easily accessible talks can turn people off SIGs. So I offered an introductory talk on tuning, how to get going with it. The talk was graceously accepted by Patrick Hurley, currently running that SIG.

The day did not start well. OK, the night before did not start well, I was suffering from trying to put too much into the talk and I was up until 1am stripping things out. I finally got it into a state I felt I could present but it lacked a few diagrams I wanted. It would have to do.

I set of OK in the morning, just past 7am. However, I got stuck on the way, a crash on the A14 had bloked the road and I missed my chance to escape. Thus I was late. I managed to call ahead but several presenters were having trouble today.

I arrived during the morning coffee break and I was up next, so it was a quick job to set up the laptop, grab a coffee and get into the right frame of mind.

The talk went OK I think, could have been a little more clear, a little more polished, but we will see what the feedback says. I was trying to get what I spend at least a whole day (and preferrably 2 or 3 days) running a course on into just under an hour.

After that and on top of the 4 hours in the car I was bushed. I hung around for lunch, had a couple of chats with fellow OUG people, including the deputy chair of the Mangement & Infrastructure SIG, Gordon Brown, which is good as we have our SIG in 2 weeks. However, I had seen Pete Finnigan’s talk at the Northern SIG, did not have much interest in the talk on Oracle Certification (sorry Joel, just not my bag) and so I did what I dislike other people doing, I left early.

A better journey back was had but then I had to get going on my latest assignment, some project management for an established client.

Hmm, this is all a bit “what I did today”. Not very interesting to other people I guess. Maybe I’ll edit it tomorrow.

Thanks Neil, I’m glad you got something out of the talk.
I’m re-writing part of the talk now! I realised when I was talking about Explain Plan that I was not clear on the difference between db block gets and consistent gets. I’ve only been using Explain Plan for 15 years and the stats section for about 10! I just took the standard advice of adding them together to get the total logical IO.
I’ll put something on this blog when I have gotten to the bottom of it.